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The highs and lows of early NHL draft rankings

With the Labour Day weekend now officially past us, it’s starting to actually feel like hockey season is here.

With the Labour Day weekend now officially past us, it’s starting to actually feel like hockey season is here.

Pre-season games are in full swing across the country in Junior A and Major Junior leagues, and the regular season has already begun in the Central Canadian Hockey League over in the Ottawa Valley area.

Plus, if you're into that sort of the thing, the cash grab that is the World Cup of Hockey also gets underway in a couple of weeks time.

Personally, I’ll be watching reruns of the 1987 Canada Cup instead, but that’s another rant for another day.

When a new hockey season is close to getting underway, I offically start to take a closer look at the player rankings for the upcoming year’s National Hockey League draft.

I know, I really shouldn’t get super excited for an event that doesn’t take place until June of 2017.

However, when you are someone who follows junior and college hockey on  a pretty intense level, you start looking for as much information as you can on players to watch during the winter as soon as you can.

With that said, you can’t really put a ton of stock into what the rankings are around this point in time, as a lot can and will happen.

In the last three years, the top pick going into the season has ended up being the player who heard his name called first on draft day.

Aaron Ekblad, Connor McDavid and Auston Matthews were all can’t miss prospects from the time they were 16 years old, or in McDavid’s case 15, so it wasn’t a shock to see them selected first.

More than likely, that will again be the case this year with Brandon Wheat Kings star centre Nolan Patrick the runaway choice to be the top pick in Chicago next June.

It’s a bit of a crapshoot behind him though.

Swedish defenceman Timothy Liljegren is currently pegged to go second overall, but after that you can basically just start picking names out of a hat.

That’s the fun that comes with these early draft rankings. Many of the players that are currently mid first-round picks often end up going in the top five.

A case in point is Finnish forward Patrik Laine, who was drafted by the Winnipeg Jets with the second overall selection only a couple of months ago.

A year earlier, Laine wasn’t even in the top five in most rankings. In fact, most thought he'd be picked midway through the first round.

At the time, defenceman Jakob Chychrun was expected to be picked right behind Matthews. Instead he was drafted with the 16th overall pick by the Arizona Coyotes.

Then there are the cases of Nick Ebert and Blake Clarke.

Both players had great rookie seasons in the Ontario Hockey League and were expected to be top five picks a year later.

Instead, Ebert was selected with the final pick in the 2012 NHL Draft, while Clarke wasn’t picked at all in 2014.

In fact, Clarke announced his retirement from junior hockey this summer, which is something no one would have expected to happen a couple of years ago.

Keep that in mind when you're watching your favourite junior hockey players this year. Like in life, things can change quickly.